BOSTON -- Watching the coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings from his Emerson College common room last week, just blocks from the finish line, Lowell native Chris Dobens wanted to help.

A week later, he and fellow Emerson student Nick Reynolds had raised more than $500,000 for the victims.

The two college students designed and sold T-shirts bearing the phrase "Boston Strong," words that became a mantra for the city as it began to heal from the bombings that killed three and injured more than 180.

"It's just a way of bringing our community together in the hardest of times," said Dobens, a 2012 Lowell High School graduate who is now a freshman marketing and communications major. "It's about raising awareness and raising each other up. There's nothing stronger than a community that just is there for each other, and we wanted to make that visually known."

The idea came when Dobens and Reynolds were watching news coverage of the bombings that afternoon. Dobens said he felt helpless at the time.

"We wanted to be down there helping people, but we were on lockdown," he said.

So he suggested selling shirts and donating the funds to the victims. Reynolds, a junior at Emerson, came up with a design, using bold yellow letters on a royal-blue background to mirror the marathon's official colors. The two started to share their plan online, hoping for a few classmates to rally behind them.

What started as a small step quickly grew into a phenomenon.

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Partnering with the shirt-printing website Ink to the People, the friends set an initial goal of 110 shirts sold by midnight this past Monday. Four hours before that deadline, they'd sold 32,836.

For the first 1,500 shirts sold, Ink to the People donated the production costs of the shirt, so the entire $20 price tag went to One Fund Boston, the nonprofit set up by Mayor Thomas Menino and Gov. Deval Patrick to aid the victims. For the rest of the shirts, $15 goes to the fund.

Thousands of Boston Strong T-shirts await shipment at the Ink To The People warehouse in Milwaukee. They were designed by Emerson College students Chris Dobens of Lowell, left in inset photo, and Nick Reynolds of Maine. Courtesy photos

In three days, Dobens and Reynolds had raised $100,000. Less than two days later, that total doubled.

As of Thursday morning, almost 34,000 shirts were sold, for a total of more than $517,000 to the One Fund.

The design has seen success outside of the sales as well.

Performing at TD Garden last Friday night, the band Fleetwood Mac projected Dobens' and Reynolds' "Boston Strong" logo as a stage backdrop.

"When we found that out, we kind of freaked," Dobens said. "It was an interesting picture to look at because it was like, 'Yeah, that's what we designed, and they're using it.'"

The image was also printed on white T-shirts, worn by the wives and children of Boston Red Sox players at a game last weekend. The fundraising effort has been lauded locally and nationally by organizations including Emerson College, Oakhurst Dairy and the Maine State Ballet.

"I had to laugh -- Seventeen Magazine took the two of them as their 'Crush of the Week,'" said Chris's mother, Deborah Dobens. "I thought that was funny. I said, 'Don't give them a swollen head!'"

She described her son as intelligent, hardworking and very active in the school band and drama productions when he was at Lowell High. While it was a shock to her to see how quickly the sales racked up, she said she wasn't surprised to see Chris finding a way to help.

"I'm a proud mama, that's all I can say," she said. "Chris has always been a go-getter. He's always been involved here in Lowell."

Reynolds is also a New England native, originally from Gorham, Maine.

"That was one of the bigger reasons we wanted to do something," Chris Dobens said. "This is kind of our precious little city."

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